Darkness singer sees the light

Justin Hawkins always expected The Darkness would score a one-way ticket to hell — and back.

“I used to say, ‘We did a brilliant first album. We’ll do an OK second album. We’ll split up and then we’ll do an amazing reunion,’ ” claims the 36-year-old singer-guitarist. “To me it was obviously inevitable.

I think everybody knew, really. You fight these things as much as you like, but your destiny is what it is.”

You can’t argue with that — nor with his spot-on summation of the British glam-rockers’ meteoric rise and fall. Formed in 2000 by Hawkins, his guitarist brother Dan, drummer Ed Graham and bassist Frankie Poullain, The Darkness served as an ironic antidote to the bitter pill of grunge. By fusing the chunky riffage of AC/DC to the helium-balloon vocals and bombast of Queen — and then outfitting the whole campy concoction in skin-tight tiger-striped Spandex — the band brilliantly parodied arena-rock excess while simultaneously embracing it.

It couldn’t last. So it didn’t. Shortly after the landmark single I Believe in a Thing Called Love helped blast their debut CD Permission to Land to platinum status, cracks appeared. Poullain left acrimoniously. Their sophomore disc One Way Ticket to Hell... And Back flopped. After landing in rehab for alcohol and drug issues in 2006, Hawkins fled the scene.

In 2009, the ice was broken when a tipsy Dan joined his brother’s new band Hot Leg onstage on a whim. Eventually, all four members saw the light, buried the hatchet and made it official, returning to the stage in Britain last year.

With a long-awaited third album in the works — and with a North American comeback tour kicking off with a sold-out show in Toronto Feb. 1 — Hawkins held a teleconference with reporters to talk about getting his hands dirty, his perverted songs and putting his genitalia on display. Some excerpts:

On reuniting:

The thing that was infectious about this was that we didn’t care. We weren’t doing it to become huge. We weren’t doing it because we’re ambitious. We’re doing it because we are genuinely loving the music ... We’re back to Square 1, where it’s just music and the creative process ... We have to fight for it. It’s gloves-off time and it’s time to get your hands dirty. It’s time to get in there and change people’s idea of what we’re doing, so it’s going to be hard work and I’m aware of that, and that’s what I’m excited about getting my teeth into now. I would sort of approach it more like a sportsman than an artist.

On the new album:

We’re in the studio even as we speak ... I think we’ve got nine of the required songs done or finished, all sounding shiny and good ... It’s kind of nearly finished now. I’d like it to be on my birthday really, which is the 17th of March. I think that would be the ultimate gift to myself.

On songwriting:

We write the kernel of the song between myself and my brother. And then we play it in a rehearsal room and we keep adding stuff to it until it can’t take anymore. I don’t know why we do that. I suppose it’s like a perversion almost. We usually try and do it on even the tritest of song concepts. On the first album, I suppose I Believe in a Thing Called Love, and Love is Only a Feeling were the ones we really layered up and got stuck into in that respect. And, yes, we’ve done it more on this album because we’ve had time. Time plus perversion equals layered music.

On testing new material live:

It’s like sending a child to sports day to see which of your children is the fastest runner. Actually, that sounds awful. It’s not like that at all. What were we talking about? That’s not what people do, is it?

On a recent show:

I did it in a kind of unusually thin Lycra outfit, which I suppose made it easier really, because then I was less worried about the (music) and more worried about my genitalia being on display. But it’s nice to do the tightrope, you know what I mean? I always feel like the chaos and the terror is what brings out the best in us ... We’ve made mistakes in front of audiences, which is the only way to do it. That is when you take your pants off and you stand there and cry.

On touring:

Being on tour is why we decided to do it in the first place. That’s the lifestyle that we all craved and need. We’re nomads, we’re islanders and we just want to travel. We have to. I live next to the sea and I think that somebody told me that that’s what people who need to travel do. They can see the ocean because if you’re not traveling, you have to be able to see the ocean ... All I want to do is live on a tour bus and have an identical day but albeit in a different town every day. It’s nice. It keeps you grounded, actually.

On sobriety:

I’ve been old and clean and health-conscious and all those things for what seems like an eternity — like ages, you know? It’s not like I’m counting even ... It’s not an ascetic life but it is pretty simple — a little house near my parents, near the sea, my girlfriend, the dogs, cats. I just write songs and keep myself in shape. And that’s it, you know. That’s my life. I think I’ve done enough living now to write the next couple of albums. I’ll start living again when I’ve run out of songs.

On his goals:

Something I’ve always wanted to do is a musical but, you know, musical from beginning to end, not like a musical of our songs horned into a storyline. I started to work on one that was called The Collapse of the Lowestoft Fishing Industry ... The main character has lost his throat to cancer so you have to sing all the songs in a voicebox. But that’s kind of ... I’ve got about three of the songs for it and the storyline but that’s the stage it’s been at since 1995. Don’t know if I’ll ever get around to finishing it.